When images of the Wesboro Baptist Church, its Pastor Fred Phelps, and his family come to mind, there is an assumption that the whole family are following Pastor Fred's party line in persecuting gays and harrasing military funerals. To my surprise, I found that this is not so. Apparently three of Fred's thirteen children are estranged from the Phelps family, and are not involved in the Westboro Church's ugly, hateful activities. More interestingly, Fred's sixth child, Nate Phelps, is an advocate for the LGBT community. I have read a number of Nate Phelps's blog articles and am heartened that at least one of the Phelps clan has a sane, rational mind functioning in their head. To provide some contrast to Fred's bile...here is an extract from his son Nate's take on the wisdom of love, and the foolishness of hatred. Kudos to Nate Phelps for rejecting the hatred being peddled by his father Fred and the rest of the Phelps family active in the Wesboro Baptist Church, and Kudos to Nate Phelps for engaging with reason as a means of attempting to discover what is true, rather than rely on authority, or the revelations of this or that cleric or this or that scriptural text. I invite you to examine the articles in Nate Phelps blog, if only to compare and contrast with Fred Phelp's vile liturgy of biblically justified hatred.
